Key Features

A very broad approach to user experience through its components—usability, usefulness, and emotional impact with special attention to lightweight methods such as rapid UX evaluation techniques and an agile UX development process

Universal applicability of processes, principles, and guidelines—not just for GUIs and the Web, but for all kinds of interaction and devices: embodied interaction, mobile devices, ATMs, refrigerators, and elevator controls, and even highway signage

Extensive design guidelines applied in the context of the various kinds of affordances necessary to support all aspects of interaction

A lifecycle template that can be instantiated and tailored to a given project, for a given type of system development, on a given budget

Description

The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience aims to help readers learn how to create and refine interaction designs that ensure a quality user experience (UX). The book seeks to expand the concept of traditional usability to a broader notion of user experience; to provide a hands-on, practical guide to best practices and established principles in a UX lifecycle; and to describe a pragmatic process for managing the overall development effort.
The book provides an iterative and evaluation-centered UX lifecycle template, called the Wheel, for interaction design. Key concepts discussed include contextual inquiry and analysis; extracting interaction design requirements; constructing design-informing models; design production; UX goals, metrics, and targets; prototyping; UX evaluation; the interaction cycle and the user action framework; and UX design guidelines.
This book will be useful to anyone interested in learning more about creating interaction designs to ensure a quality user experience. These include interaction designers, graphic designers, usability analysts, software engineers, programmers, systems analysts, software quality-assurance specialists, human factors engineers, cognitive psychologists, cosmic psychics, trainers, technical writers, documentation specialists, marketing personnel, and project managers.

Rex Hartson

Rex Hartson is a pioneer researcher, teacher, and practitioner-consultant in HCI and UX. He is the founding faculty member of HCI (in 1979) in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. With Deborah Hix, he was co-author of one of the first books to emphasize the usability engineering process, Developing user interfaces: Ensuring usability through product & process. Hartson has been principle investigator or co-PI at Virginia Tech on a large number of research grants and has published many journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters. He has presented many tutorials, invited lectures, workshops, seminars, and international talks. He was editor or co-editor for Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, Volumes 1-4, Ablex Publishing Co., Norwood, NJ. His HCI practice is grounded in over 30 years of consulting and user experience engineering training for dozens of clients in business, industry, government, and the military.

Pardha Pyla

Pardha S. Pyla is a Senior User Experience Specialist and Interaction Design Team Lead at Bloomberg LP. Before that he was a researcher and a UX consultant. As an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech he worked on user experience methodologies and taught graduate and undergraduate courses in HCI and Software Engineering. He is a pioneer researcher in the area of bridging the gaps between software engineering and UX engineering lifecycle processes.

Quotes and reviews

"The book is brimming with advanced knowledge for perfecting written communication in our mobile digital age… If you write anything at all (you send emails, don’t you?), you need to grab a copy of Letting Go of the Words and keep it close at hand…This book has joined my writer’s bookshelf as a valued aid I refer to every day."--TechWhirl.com, January 21, 2014